How-to

Tech

If you happen to be a fan of the heavy metal band Isis (an unfortunate name, to be
sure), you may have trouble ordering its merchandise online. Last year,
Paypal suspended
a fan who ordered an Isis t-shirt, presumably on the false assumption
that there was some association between the heavy metal band and the
terrorist group ISIS.

Showing that more data can equal more performance out even at huge scale
suggests that there could be even greater benefits to being a data-rich tech
giant like Google, Facebook, or Microsoft than previously realized.
Crunching Google’s giant dataset of 300 million images didn’t produce a huge
benefit—jumping from 1 million to 300 million images increased the object
detection score achieved by just 3 percentage points—but the paper’s authors
say they think can widen that advantage by tuning their software to be
better suited to super-large datasets. Even if that turns out not to be the
case, in the tech industry small advantages can be important. Every
incremental gain in the accuracy of self-driving car vision will be crucial,
for example, and a small efficiency boost to a product that draws billions
in revenue adds up fast.